A customer may contact a contact center of a business for a particular purpose, but may have additional needs or interests that the contact center can also serve. It is desirable to discover those additional needs or interests and serve them during the time that the customer would normally spend waiting to have served their primary need, i.e., the need that caused the customer to contact the contact center in the first place.
The art already provides for interacting with a customer in various ways while the customer is waiting for a call center agent. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,820,260 discloses customizing an applet (an application program) for a waiting customer based on the customer's selection of an in-queue experience and other customer data, and executing the applet to interact with the waiting customer.
The art also provides for enqueuing of a customer (of the customer's call) in multiple queues. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,434,230 discloses using attributes of a call to find one or more resources that fit those attributes, and enqueuing the call in the queues of the one or more resources. The call is served by only one of the resources for which it has been queued.
Neither of these capabilities of the prior art necessarily serves the needs or interests of the customer that are additional to the customer's primary need.